Risk, Embodiment and Health Technologies

A One day workshop hosted by Biosocialities, Health and Citizenship RRG
and the SMS network

The Biosocialities, Health and Citizenship reading and research group
utilizes theoretical and empirically informed discussions of ‘biosociality’ (Rabinow
1996, Rose and Novas 2001, Gibbon and Novas 2008, Nugyen 2007, Petryna 2002 )
as a starting point for critical engagement with questions around the global
expansion of a range of medical technologies and questions of citizenship. We explore how, and to what extent, different
technologies and forms of medical intervention become grafted onto, or informed
by, articulations of citizenship and what the scope (and limits) are of these
theoretical orientations for understandings the relationship between medical
technology and identity in a variety of diverse cultural contexts.

Anthropologists and others have
for some time been examining the way that new health technologies raise
important questions about identity and the body, as well as the way such interventions
configure future health risks. While the transformative dimensions of health
technologies for personhood and identity have been widely examined, there has
been less attention to the way that techniques of monitoring and intervening on
the body entail and reproduce particular kinds of embodied selves and the ways
this may then inform perceptions of, and engagement with, health risks. This
symposium aims to re-engage with the question of embodiment and identity
critically reconsidering, from an empirical and methodological point of view,
how approaches to embodied experience might be used to illuminate the
relationship between technology, the body and identity.

Recognizing the need to attend to
the way that diverse health technologies constitute and transform risk and
embodiment, this interdisciplinary symposium is convened in order to build
capacity as well as consolidate emerging scholarship on perspectives of risk, embodiment, and health
technologies. This meeting presents
a diverse field of novel independent research undertaken by members of our
research group in Anthropology. In partnership with members of the Science,
medicine, and Society Network, this symposium will also include perspectives on
risk and embodiment from a wide range of experts who are actively engaged in
the future of British and global health landscapes. Some of the diverse topics addressed in this
meeting include the use of mobile health technologies among elders in East
London; ‘dDeaf Logics’ as embodied visual practice; reflections on fieldwork as
embodied research; the temporal embodiment of risk in low risk pregnancy; the
embodied meaning of food for those at risk of diabetes; local biologies of
embodied risk for cancer in Brazil, and other intersections between society and
the human body.

Schedule

09.30–10.00

Welcome and
Introductions

Chairs: Sahra Gibbon and Aaron Parkhurst

10.00–10.30

Lucy
Irvine: Elder’s experiences of
community, embodiment and new health technology in Canning Town

10.30–11.00

Kelly
Robinson: Looking to Listen -
Unpacking the Logics of dDeafness

11.30–12.00

Discussant David Napier and open discussion

12.00–13.15

Lunch

13.15–13.45

Allison Horan: Better Safe Than Sorry: Exploring The
Embodiment(s) of Risk in Pregnancy